carpathian-basin

The Carpathian Basin, the plain enclosed by the Carpathians that is now Hungary and its neighbours, was the western end of every steppe movement into Europe: Huns, Avars and the Magyar conquerors each ruled it in turn. Ancient DNA has sequenced the elites of all three and shown how little of them survives in the modern population, which carries the region's older European base. That base is a matter of descent; a steppe-born language is not a steppe-born genome, and neither is an identity.

The articles resolve Hungary's founding paradox of a European genome with a steppe-born language, with the conquerors' genomes sequenced and modern Hungarians barely carrying them, walk through the Carpathian Basin's layered story and how to read a Hungarian genome, reconstruct Avar-period families, marriage networks and neighbouring communities of different ancestry, and follow the DNA that connects some European Huns to Xiongnu elite lineages while revealing a highly diverse Carpathian Basin population.